


what makes a monster ?

by Verannode



Category: Saints Row
Genre: Boss aint a happy person, Character Study-ish, Drug Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Other, So fair warning, beware all the shit u wld expect from SR1/SR2, fuck cops lol, listen most of this aint happy, this got dark VERY quickly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:27:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25574314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Verannode/pseuds/Verannode
Summary: People always called her a psychopath, not that she knew what that was.
Relationships: Boss/therapy, implied Boss/Shaundi (Saints Row)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4





	what makes a monster ?

**Author's Note:**

> listen im a slut for saints row but i also fucking hate SR3 and SR4 so this is technically an AU? anyway fuck cops

The change was gradual.

There was an underlying finesse to violence to begin with. Harper had learnt young, and learnt fast. It was from her mom and dad, from when she was just a child, that she learnt - where to kick and where to punch and where to make it hurt. Back then, their heavy hands and biting words were lessons. 

She'd limp into school and kick the shit out of her classmates the same way they had done to her. The same way they did to each other. 

Harper doesn't understand, back then, that it wasn't normal to watch your parents beat each other black and blue. That your parents shouldn't hate each other. That your dad shouldn't stumble home high on some psycho shit and pull the hair out of your scalp.

Without friends and without guidance, it's where that change begins. 

* * *

The first time Harper sees someone die is from behind thin cupboard doors. 

Her father had his hands around her mom's throat. He smelt of spice, with his pupils so dilated they could be black. When Harper had heard him come home, she had hidden, knowing what was to come next. Her mom hadn't.

It's silent when her body stops struggling. Stops moving. Just _stops_. 

Sat in a cupboard, Harper does nothing.

* * *

The last time she sees her dad is six months later, on her sixteenth birthday, from behind a stand. He cries at his trial, pleading guilty to 2nd degree manslaughter.

Harper stays frozen throughout the entire trial. Somehow, somewhere, she understood that this was fucked up. That most kids didn't have to stand as a witness to their dad's murder trial. It doesn't matter to her, though. 

She hated both of them. They deserved it, didn't they? Harper still doesn't quite understand.

When he's dragged away, screaming and crying and reaching out for her, Harper stares long and hard at the man. The man she called her father.

She doesn't reach back.

* * *

After that, the change came through brawling and street racing. 

Harper was officially an orphan, not that the system gave a shit about that, and so she had to pay for everything. It was a little harder than she had imagined when she was twelve and fantasied about leaving home. Once, her dead mom had told her that education was important. 

So, Harper scams her way into college, and is pushed into two jobs and night classes to make up for it. The school she used to go to always said she was smart, but never applied herself, and so Harper figures it won't be so hard.

It isn't. The worst thing about it is the cost. Which is what draws her into the slips, and down into seedy fight clubs to brawl out for money. Both paid so well she couldn't afford to say no, even if it was illegal. And she gets good. Real good, earning just enough to keep herself above the water, living in her junk-shit of a car.

It's just a year before it all crumbles. The cops shut down the ring, and that steady income vanishes. Then they sniff out the slips in a raid that lands Harper thrown into juvie, if briefly. 

The system gives her nothing and once she gets out, homeless and penniless, with only her car and the clothes on her back, she learns the streets are fair game to any prick with a gun.

Gang violence that she was once so disconnected from pushes and pulls at the very fringes of Stilwater.

Festering anger leads to hatred as Harper watches the cops get fat off of bribe money, and lazy with glory hunting. People die in the streets and they do nothing, _no one_ does anything, and Harper hates that most of all.

* * *

It's on the streets of the row that she learns how to survive. Picking locks, shoplifting, manipulating, anything to get by. She learns when to look vulnerable, and when to throw her fists, and when to run.

Learns that the world doesn't owe you shit. 

She doesn't notice the dead that litter the streets now. It's a distraction, trying to pretend you have morals in the city of Stilwater - that you could do anything to help stop the senseless violence that eats at the core of this city. 

There's a numb feeling now when she next looks at another dead beggar - his shoes stolen from his feet, dumped in a side street and chest riddled with holes.

It's _so easy_ not to care.

So she doesn't. Not anymore.

* * *

The world decides to fuck her one last time.

Walking back to her car, stolen money comfortably in pocket, the Vice Kings start a fight.

Harper find herself where she always is, at the wrong place, at the wrong time.

This time, she wonders if she'll just lay down and die. It would be easy to just end it all, than live in the purgatory of her life. 

* * *

The Saints give her purpose. Reason. A place to sleep at night that isn't her fucking car.

Harper sees them as family, the only ones to ever give her a chance. It's all she wanted, a chance at life, and she carves herself out in their image.

So desperate to stay, to have _any_ form of family that wasn't already dead, that she pretends she doesn't notice Troy and his odd tactics, the way he sometimes acts like a fucking cop. Or Dex, when he pockets a little more than his share of the cut each week. Or even Julius when he begins to look at her with more fear than respect, more hatred than love. 

She pretends and pretends and pretends, because without them, without her friends, she'd be another dead beggar.

* * *

When Harper wakes up, there's an anger in her chest she can't rid. Like a void, it consumes her every thoughts.

Betrayed. So many times it had carved itself into her sternum alongside the burns that cover an entire half of her body. It's a wound that festers and bleeds and refuses to heal.

It only ever gets worse - the Saints are all but gone - replaced by some ivory tower hellscape that makes her ill to even look at - and Gat's on trial with no chance of mercy. Everything she had ever built, ever cared about, had been taken from her. All that she had carved herself into was just a memory.

Her family was dead, and all Harper could feel was empty, all consuming _rage_.

* * *

Things had been getting better, it was that that strikes Harper the most.

Then Carlos is dragged behind a fucking truck.

Then Shaundi is kidnapped, and Shivington burns.

Then Aisha is murdered, beheaded in her own house. 

Over the space of two weeks, Harper's entire crusade is turned into a vicious bloodbath. Day and night, the streets sound with gunfire. It's worse than Stilwater's heyday, worse than when she first rolled with the Saints, because she simply doesn't fucking _care_ anymore.

It only gets worse. Troy betrays their tentative deal, betrays Harper _again_ , the cops flying off the handle and killing any colour they see.

Gat lies in hospital, stab wounds deep enough to keep even him down.

As it all crumbles, all she can think about is before - five years ago when she was young and naive and stupid enough to care. And here she was, repeating her own history. It felt like a shitty, awful, goddamn waste of a magic trick.

On the third week after Carlos' death, and one since the beginning of the bloodbath, Harper decides to visit Troy. She goes to yell. To scream into his fucking face and tell him how badly, how desperately she wanted him dead, and then to put a bullet in his head.

It's inadvertent that she latches onto the closest, most accessible thing to blame. Because all of this can't be _her_ fault. She truly couldn't of caused this, could she? The amount of guilt, dirty filthy guilt, she felt wasn't _hers_ to bare. It _couldn't_ be.

Though, when she's finally there, standing in his house and watching the man stumble into his own house drunk, nothing comes out of her mouth. 

She felt... empty.

Everything that happened, everything they did together with the Saints, with Julius, Dex, the Vice Kings, the Carnales, even the fucking Rollerz, he had felt authentic. Maybe a little naive, maybe knowing a little too much, maybe thinking like a cop a little too often, but Harper had still seen him as a brother. Still sees him that way, despite it all.

_Blood in._

And that's when Troy fumbles into his waistband, draws his police issued pistol, and shoots Harper in the gut.

Harper stops feeling sentimental after that.

* * *

Carlos' death is mourned quietly. His brother is there, along with a few veteran Saints and her remaining Lieutenants. Harper watches from afar as his casket is lowered. No one says a thing that day. It rains, like it did when she put a bullet in his skull. 

As the wake, she drinks as much as she lays eyes on. 

She knows it's her fault. The guilt is there under the surface, heavy and choking. Harper knows she can only suffer it alone.

She pretends to blame the Brotherhood anyway.

* * *

Aisha's funeral, her real funeral, is bigger, grander. Veteran Saints who knew her personally attend in droves. Others, greener boys, remember her all around the city for her music, her wit and charm, her legacy as the Row's greatest celebrity. It's half a celebration, half a funeral, and Harper can't tell which one she hates more.

She stands by Gat's side as they bury her. It's hard to know what to feel. The comedown to revenge, to vengeance and anger and all the things Harper assumes is grief is the worst part to it all. It doesn't bring her back. Nothing does. Harper's lost enough people to know that they sit in your chest, never leaving but never there. 

Gat stays stoic, both of them do, but she can see the tears he lets fall.

That woman, smart and funny and kind to her when she was just a pathetic mute, was the love of his life. She can't even begin to image what that feels like.

At the very least, she's thankful the funeral isn't some public, televised thing - the entire graveyard is swarming with Saints protecting their own.

At the wake, Harper doesn't drink. It feels like the turn of a new age, and the uncertainty of that thought scares her more than death ever did.

* * *

Their change from street gang to multinational corporation happens so fast and so sudden that it hurts.

Every value the 3rd Street Saints held is now some funny pitch to sell to the public. Every death it had taken to elevate the Saints to this grand pedestal suddenly felt empty, a useless death for a hollow victory.

Everything her family once was is now sold off to the masses as quaint toys. As fucking _lunchboxes_.

The gang becomes so big that Harper hears of new Saints she's never even _met_.

Sat atop their new throne of gold, watching as her friends are forcefully moulded into strangers, as she herself becomes a mockery of the ganglord she used to be, Harper feels the empty space in her chest only widen.

 _The Boss -_ the name that used to evoke fear, that used to be as revered as a _fucking bogyman_ \- can barely recognise herself in the mirror.

For some reason, the new age of the Saints felt like the end.

* * *

She doesn't tell anybody, but in the five years after they take Stilwater, Harper goes to therapy.

At first, she went because she was bored and wanted a funny story to tell Gat when she inevitably killed the therapist. Instead she walks out and finds herself wanting. 

It was as if someone had walked into her head, and shown her everything she hated about herself, shown her something she hadn't even considered. The drive back, Harper realises how tired she is. Of the emptiness in her chest, the nothingness she feels that she can't fucking get rid of. That _nothing_ can get rid of.

It's that which makes her go back.

* * *

When Gat dies, she can't believe it. Doesn't believe it.

Even as they massacre Steelport in bloody retaliation, Harper can't bring herself to so much as acknowledge it. Because it's Johnny _fucking_ Gat, her best friend, the man that had stood by her since the very first Saints. The only one who had stood by her since she was nineteen years old and fresh off the streets.

Every night, she waits for Gat to stumble through into her apartment, or leave an angry voicemail filled with gunfire, or text her a stupid message about Freckle-bitches.

Every night, when that call doesn't come, when he doesn't appear, she feels that bit more empty.

Harper stops going to therapy a few days after the plane crash.

* * *

It started slowly, like a creeping itch, but eventually, the famed butcher of Stilwater rears her head, and the mockery that _The Boss_ had been turned into fades into a background of hatred.

The loss of Gat had pushed her, the Syndicate had pushed her, the media, the executives, Ultor, they pushed and pushed and pushed until something inevitably snapped. The Boss returns and carves Steelport into pieces.

When she looses Loren at the Syndicate tower, after their month long game of cat and mouse, Harper tracks him down to the hospital he had been put into under an alias. She carves SAINTS into his chest with a knife and watches him die with a smile on her face and her shirt-sleeves stained in blood.

When Mat Miller tries to fuck with her, she poisons his entire crew with radioactive material, straps the fucker to his own chair and runs as many volts as she can through his head. He leaves town the very next day.

By the time she gets to Killbane, Harper had reformed the Saints into the gang-organisation it had meant to be, trimming the fat until they were once again the feared street gang that had beaten an entire city into submission. 

It's only when, half blood-crazed, she gleefully explains to Pierce exactly what she had planned for Killbane, to met met with a vaguely horrified expression, does she understand their sudden new reality.

Ultor had officially tried to pull away from the Saints. Over six years of work was suddenly gone, and the people they had beat themselves into to fit that reality were now left in the dust.

Her crusade had fucked up more than just her very self.

But there were sayings surrounding unstoppable forces.

* * *

She reduces Killbane to less than nothing. Harper knew she wasn't going to kill him. Oh no, that would be far to merciful an end for him.

First, she takes his reputation. Then his mask. Then his casino, his wealth, his gang. Then his family, his friends, anyone who had ever even _looked_ at him nicely.

And when she was finished, Killbane, the living legend of the ring, was dead, and in his place was a pathetic, broken Eddie Prior. The King of the Ring, the Walking Apocalypse, begs at her feet.

Harper laughs and walks away.

* * *

It's the comedown that hits her the hardest.

Harper had ripped apart everything she had become to avenge Gat, and now with what was left, she just couldn't take it.

The thrice-damned fucking _emptiness_.

When she gets talked down by Shaundi in the middle of a drug fuelled bender, all but ready to throw herself off the side of the obliterated Syndicate building, she finally gets reeled back in.

Shaundi comes and finds her, takes her by the collar and shoves her in a plane. In less than twenty four hours she's back in Stilwater, sat on her therapist's couch and shivering through withdrawals.

* * *

It's weeks before she's back in Steelport.

* * *

When STAG tries to move in and destroy the Saints, Harper flies back to Steelport- half stable, on new medication, and ready to tear every single stupid uniform to shreds.

This time, though, her path of destruction is tempered, controlled. Ruefully, Harper is remind of Julius on his own crusade, one only filled with clever manoeuvres, a far cry from the destruction she rained. It was a shame he was dead, Harper would of laughed into his face otherwise.

It was still brutal, still ruthless in the way that they killed everyone in their path, but this time around she allows herself to stop. To think, to wait, to watch and then to act.

As the media reels from their destructive streak, Harper adds another tally to their sins.

She pushes STAG to the brink of desperation, humiliating them at every possible turn. When they begin to turn Steelport into a militarised state in a final, desperate bid for control, Harper stops. She steps back.

The US government get humiliated in turn for the decision. There's riots in the streets by the very people they were claiming to protect. In the end, the Saints merely have to watch as STAG is destroyed by the public, and the police force in Steelport cut in half.

The Saints move into the city and no one bats an eye.

When the Mayor calls for a meeting with the Boss, she can only laugh.

* * *

Steelport is hers.

Pierce, as his is custom, throws a city wide party to celebrate.

The remnants of STAG that cling to Steelport are actively dismantled, Kinzie pulling at the strings of the FBI's own networks. Since the first time she landed, Harper finally lets herself relax. Enjoys the party.

Shaundi stays comfortably at her side the entire night, and as Harper gravitates through the people, an unfamiliar feeling takes grip.

Sure, the space in her chest still feels raw, but the wounds that had sat atop it for so many years had slowly, painstakingly, begun to heal. The emptiness was gone.

Maybe, just maybe, this was what Gat had felt like when they had stood on top of the world.

He's laughing at her in hell, she just knows it.

**Author's Note:**

> ive had this sitting around for a while and thought fuck it, may as well


End file.
